Douglas Adams

The funniest and cleverest author I have ever read. And it’s not just the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy - reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is one of the few times I’ve had to pause reading a book to deal with the sharp, physical pain from laughing so hard. One lesser known work that I loved - Last Chance to See, a short non-fiction work about his adventures finding and documenting endangered species around the world (Komodo dragons and kakapos and shit).

The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

This book has influenced my worldview more than any other in adult life. I already knew to have a growth mindset about myself - but because of Deutsch, I now have a growth mindset about humanity.

And not out of rose-tinted-glass-half-full optimism but because it makes sense given our current best explanations for how reality works. I didn't really understand the multiverse bits of this book, but the epistemology-focused parts (the bulk) are essential reading.

P.G. Wodehouse

The second funniest author I have read after our boy Doug above. But with P.G.-and no one else - I find myself savoring his wit. That shit is truly savory. The Wooster and Jeeves series is my favorite.

Roald Dahl

If you asked me the age of my inner child, I’d say it’s 11. And what was I doing at 11? Tearing through Roald Dahl books. Decades later, my home has close to too many references to his work. The man had a remarkable turn-of-phrase including many made-up words (not to mention names e.g. Augustus Gloop and Bruce Bogtrotter) and his descriptions of food (real and invented). And he also had softness - my favourite Roal Dahl book is *Danny the Champion of the World -* unlike Dahl's regular cynicalish view of adults, this is a tender story of a parent-child relationship.

Also underrated — Roald Dahl's short stories for adults that are surprisingly (unsurprisingly?) dark and sexual yet still unmistakably him. Confusing in a fun way.

Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb — especially in Antifragile — peeled back a couple of layers of reality. Taleb + Deutsch clued me into 1) the limitations of inductive thinking and 2) the importance of error-correction. But unlike Deutsch, Taleb's work has this additional smooth-brained approach to living in a world you — as an individual — cannot fully comprehend.

Note: I studiously avoid his Twitter and you probably should too — the protein is all in the books (though I also regularly return to this commencement address of his from 2016).

In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent

This book about conlangs helped me begin to understand memes (in the Dawkins sense) years before I read about this formally - regular languages are living, evolving, shape-shifting beasts while invented languages tend to be designed in a vacuum, devoid of life, and therefore doomed to fail.